Manual reviews of software application development projects are routinely performed to determine whether a project is on schedule, on budget and will deliver the promised function at the appropriate level of quality. Over the years, a number of researchers have shown that the failure rate of software development projects is exceptionally high and those studies also provide high level guidance on the typical or common root causes. The general categories of failure are known and are documented in many publications, including, for example, two publications authored by Steve McConnell entitled Code Complete, Microsoft Press (1993) and Rapid Development, Microsoft Press (1996), both of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference in their entirety. What is not as well understood is how to ascertain that a particular area of failure is present on a software development project. In addition, existing references do not include a logical approach to assess project management processes and their impact on the overall success or failure of a project.
A typical software project reviewer manually focuses on the project management system and/or dives deep into the technical aspects of the project. By operating purely at the project management system level, the reviewer may miss an underlying cause of corruption in the best practices by not applying a disciplined, logical approach to assessing the evidence that is generated by the effective use of project management best practices, i.e., by not assessing the artifacts that are produced. For example, a reviewer may look to determine that an issues management system is in place, but fail to check to determine if an issues log has the correct and adequate data to allow the issues management system to work. At the other end of the spectrum, i.e., at the technical end, a reviewer may focus on the technology or product dimensions of software delivery and fail to assess or understand the people and process impact on the ability of the team to deliver the required application.
By not having a logical, holistic, and end-to-end approach with consistent scoring and focused questions to identify areas of failure, the traditional review boils down to the application of the experience of the reviewer to the situation. If the reviewer has limited experience, then the validity of the project assessment suffers.
Thus, provided herein is a true end-to-end assessment approach which removes the product development project assessment from simply the reviewer's experience.